Now Playing: The Black Panthers

For screenings around the country (including NYC now thru Oct 27), visit theblackpanthers.com.

New book of note - St. Marks Is Dead: The Many Lives of America’s Hippest Street by Ada Calhoun

St. Marks Place and Third Avenue, 1963, photographer unknown.

Ada Calhoun, the author of this enticing new title on the fabled stretch of 8th Street in NYC recently posted the above image of Third Avenue & Saint Marks Place on Facebook, and it caught my eye. That's how I found out, eventually, about her new book coming out in November. Count me in.

If the following quote by Calhoun (from a Q&A on her website) is any indication, this should be an excellent read!

"...In the course of three years of research, I learned that people have always said St. Marks was dead. One thing you hear a lot about the street is: “I was there when it was cool. It’s over now.” People said that in the fifties about the thirties, and in the eighties about the sixties. Whenever people say that to me I ask them to tell me the last time they stayed out until super late on St. Marks Place. I did recently and it was packed with young people having the time of their lives. I’m very suspicious of anyone who identifies the best era in a place’s history as coinciding precisely with when they were sixteen."

St. Marks Is Dead: The Many Lives of America’s Hippest Street:

Coming November 2, 2015, from W.W. Norton & Co. 

Pre-order from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or iBookstore

Audio of the Week: Interview with Ed Bahlman, founder of 99 Records

99 Records storefront, MacDougal St, NYC, by Ian Robb

A short, interesting interview with 99 Records founder & owner, Ed Bahlman. Unfortunately I don't know the date or origin of the interview, but it obviously dates to the early 80's as he's speaking of the bands in the present tense. It definitely pre-dates ESG's debut album.

John Coltrane: A Force For Good

John Coltrane as interviewed by KPFK radio's Frank Kofsky in November 1966. 

Watch the video or stream it via Soundcloud.

I Can't Get No...

Movie of the Week / Revolutions On Air: The Golden Era of New York Radio 1980 - 1988

Red Bull Music just keeps doing it. This recently produced short documentary about the early days of hip hop radio in NYC is pure magic - I cannot recommend it enough.

For info on a roundtable discussion (May 27, NYC) featuring some of the folks who appear in the film, click here.  And for even more info, read the feature on the Red Bull site which has plenty of YouTube & Soundcloud samples for your aural delight.

Daily Travels: 16 Barrow Street, NYC

New film alert: Teenage - In US theaters now in limited release

It just opened this past weekend in NYC, and will be opening in the following cities over the next couple of months:

• March 21: Los Angeles
• March 28: Austin & Irvine
• April 4: San Diego
• April 11: Atlanta
• April 18: Denver & Philadelphia
• April 25: Berkeley & San Francisco
• May 2: Dallas
• May 9: Seattle
• May 23: Boston, Minneapolis & Washington, D.C.

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Nightclubbing Installation at NYU's Fales Library To Open March 20

Thirty-Four Years Later, the World's Earliest VJs Recreate their Historic Danceteria Video Lounge in NYU’s Bobst Library

New York University’s Fales Library and Special Collections presents the GoNightclubbing Video Lounge, a multi-media installation curated by Pat Ivers and Emily Armstrong paying tribute to the infamous Danceteria Video Lounge, which they created in 1980. The re-imagined Video Lounge installation celebrates Ivers and Armstrong’s work at the iconic Danceteria nightclub, where they pioneered the video DJ concept during the height of the punk rock era. The GoNightclubbing Video Lounge opens March 20, 2014 at 6pm, third floor, Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, 70 Washington Square South, (at LaGuardia Place). [Subways A, C, E, B, D, F, M to West 4th Street; 6 line to Astor Place; R train to 8th Street].

The Video Lounge installation derives from Ivers’ and Armstrong’s GoNightclubbing Archive, part

Emily Armstrong and Pat Ivers (photo by Kevin Gannon)

of the Fales Downtown Collection. Acquired by Fales in 2013, the Archive consists of video of 82 bands at 115 musical performances, 20+ interviews, photographs, video art, early music videos, posters, flyers, and video DJ sampler reels, all restored digitally and integrated with Ivers and Armstrong’s database of dates, locations, band lineups, set lists and other ephemera. The re-imagined GoNightclubbing Video Lounge will be a feature of “Punk Turns Forty,” a conference being held at NYU and Cooper Union in downtown Manhattan in April 2014.

“Pat and Emily documented New York’s punk rock scene better than anyone,” said Marvin J. Taylor, Head of Fales Library and Special Collections. “Their videos are of the best quality and the best bands. Danceteria was more than just a club, it was a gathering place for artists of all stripes in the exploding downtown scene. Recreating the Video Lounge at the Fales Library makes a statement about embodied archival practice, something we’re committed to with the Downtown Collection.”

In 1980, Danceteria was one of the hottest clubs in Manhattan – multiple floors of music, celebrities, and entertainment. The first Danceteria Video Lounge was designed by Ivers and Armstrong, video artists who programmed an eclectic mix of found footage, video art, early music videos, and musical performances.

Ivers and Armstrong were hired to take over an entire floor of the multi-level club, where they became the among the earliest to make video an ongoing feature in a nightclub, creating a series of kitschy suburban living rooms in which they narrowcast their own original archive of music performance, simulcast live band performances, and showcased the work of downtown artists like Keith Haring and John Sex.

"Our original Video Lounge placed viewers in the familiar coziness of a living room setting, then challenged them with unfamiliar, non-commercial content,” said Ivers. “As VJs, our programming was a mix of new music performances we had shot, a real departure from the popular sounds of disco which dominated the club scene at the time.”

‘We mixed in the work of downtown artists who had just begun exploring video as a form, as well as a potpourri of found footage that deconstructed accepted media iconography in an ironic way,” continued Armstrong. “The Video Lounge was much like today’s YouTube, with its mix of seemingly random video clips that somehow make sense to the modern media sensibility. Revisiting the Gonightclubbing Video Lounge in 2014 puts today’s viewers back on the sofas to watch content, sometimes with strangers, but in a public setting, disconnected from the singularity of their computers.”

The programming included early music videos and Ivers and Armstrong’s footage of live performances by such bands as the Dead Boys, Iggy Pop and Richard Hell, as well as found footage, movie trailers and vintage commercials. In addition to Keith Haring and John Sex, other artists, including David Wojnarowicz, Frank Hennenlotter, Paul Dougherty, Kenny Scharf, and Robin Schanzenbach, would bring their work to share with the VJs.

Mark Kamins interview with Love Saves the Day author Tim Lawrence

Kamins at Danceteria. Courtesy of Emily Armstrong.

Writer Tim Lawrence, who wrote the indispensable history of dance music in New York City during the 70's, Love Saves the Day, conducted a lengthy interview with longtime DJ and record producer, Mark Kamins back in 2008. At the time, Lawrence was doing research for his long awaited Love Saves-follow up, Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980-83, due in 2015.

Kamins, of course, was an essential face on the scene at the time between DJ'ing at clubs like Danceteria, and working with artists. He is best known for helping Madonna get her record deal, and did plenty of great remixes, and recordings as well, which has been thoroughly documented. He was tireless, and sadly passed away about a year ago.

Red Bull Music Academy recently posted a short version of the interview, and if you're really compelled, you can get the entire thing over at Tim Lawrence's site. While reading, I suggest listening to this terrific collection of Kamin's related recordings curated by Lawrence, and posted by Red Bull.

Danceteria flyer for opening night. Courtesy of Rudolf Piper.

Movie of the Week: On the Bowery (1956)

An incredible time capsule, I highly recommend watching this film. 

Read about it, and buy it on DVD here.

Are you fucking kidding me? Is this really happening? Who is paying who, and how much?

From www.savenypl.org -

STOP THE CENTRAL LIBRARY PLAN

The Central Library Plan, at enormous cost to the city and its taxpayers, would irreparably damage the 42nd Street Research Library – one of the world's great reference libraries and a historic landmark. The New York Public Library administration plans to demolish the historic seven-story book stacks, install a circulating library in their stead, and displace 1.5 million books to central New Jersey. The new circulating library would be a reduced-size replacement for the Mid-Manhattan Library and SIBL (Science, Industry and Business Library), which would both be sold.

This plan was created through a closed process with no public input, and has been condemned by leading architecture critics such as Ada Louise Huxtable in the Wall Street Journal and Michael Kimmelman in the New York Times.

• It will cost $350 million (probably more), of which $150 million will come from New York City taxpayers.

• It will jam patrons into a new circulating library only one-third the size of the existing Mid-Manhattan Library and SIBL.

• It will threaten the 42nd Street Library’s role as one of the world’s great research libraries, and threaten the architectural integrity of the landmarked 42nd Street building.

• It does not take into consideration more efficient and less destructive alternatives, such as combining SIBL and the Mid-Manhattan into a rehabilitated and expanded building on the Mid-Manhattan site.

The NYPL administration allowed no opportunity for public participation or oversight when they formulated this plan. Despite the fact that the 42nd Street building is owned by the city and is one of our most iconic structures, the $150 million that the city has earmarked for the project was awarded without oversight by the City Council and with no public hearings. If alternatives have been considered they have never been disclosed, and no cost-benefit analysis or detailed budget has ever been presented.

The Committee to Save the NYPL calls for a halt to this plan until an independent agency can conduct a detailed cost analysis. This analysis should also evaluate the costs of renovating the Mid-Manhattan building. As Michael Kimmelman states in his scathing New York Times review of the CLP, "A new Mid-Manhattan branch should cost a fraction of gutting the stacks and could produce much better architecture.”

For more information or to join our email list, see www.savenypl.org

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Spread the word if you care about libraries & history!

Joe Bihari RIP

Joe Bihari - RIP

Joe Bihari, right, in 1954, with B.B. King, center, and the D.J. Hunter Hancock. Mr. Bihari’s Modern Records helped make Mr. King a star. Photo & caption courtesy of the NY Times.

The Origins of Saturday Night Fever: Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night by Nik Cohn

The story that changed a whole lot things, I've been meaning to post this for quite some time. Written by Nik Cohn, and published by New York Magazine on June 7, 1976, it would eventually lead to the making of Saturday Night Fever, and the disco-fication of the States and beyond. Not to mention a serious career revival for the Bee Gees. Art by James McMullan.

Over the past few months, much of my time has been spent in watching this new generation. Moving from neighborhood to neighborhood, from disco to disco, an explorer out of my depth, I have tried to learn the patterns, the old/new tribal rites. In the present article, I have focused on one club and one tight-knit group which seem to sum up the experience as a whole. Artist James McMullan also spent many hours observing this development, but his paintings, reproduced here, are less specific; although they deal with the same locations and group, they are generalized images of these Saturday night rituals.

Everything described in this article is factual and was either witnessed by me or told to me directly by the people involved. Only the names of the main characters have been changed. Continued here.

Event of Note: Barney Hoskyns reading in Woodstock, NY, this weekend

No stranger to Woodstock, NY, Rock's Back Pages very own Barney Hoskyns will be in town this weekend to do a reading and Q&A at The Golden Notebook. In town researching a book on the history of the scene in Woodstock, Hoskyns' past titles include books on The Band, Led Zeppelin, Laurel Canyon & Los Angeles, Tom Waits, and several others.

The reading will take place at 3:00PM on Oct. 13. 

All necessary info can be found here.

Stupefied: The Preston Lauterbach Playlist

This week's edition of the Stupefied Playlist© is brought to us by Mr. Preston Lauterbach. Besides posessing one of the cooler names I've come across recently, Mr. Lauterbach has written one hell of a book on an oft-ignored subject in the pre-history of rock & roll: the chitlin' circuit. The book (available now in paperback) is entitled The Chitlin' Circuit and the Road To Rock & Roll, and its highly recommended by us here at Stupefaction central.

Preston Lauterbach

As a sort of primer and/or soundtrack to the book, check out this slammin' list Preston was kind enough to put together. It loosely traces the narrative of the story, and really is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to musical suggestions made by the text. A BIG thanks to Preston!

Official Website

The Chitlin' Circuit and the Road To Rock & Roll on Amazon

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01. The Falcons “You’re So Fine”

02. Sax Kari “Chocolate Fizz”

03. Jimmie Lunceford & the Chickasaw Syncopators “In Dat Mornin’”

04. Jimmie Lunceford “Organ Grinders Swing”

05. Earl Hines “Piano Man”

06. Lil Green “In the Dark”

07. Champion Jack Dupree “Junker Blues”

08. Fats Domino “The Fat Man”

09. Louis Jordan “Knock Me A Kiss”

10. Joe Turner “It’s Alright” (From Spirituals to Swing) or “My Gal’s a Jockey”

11. Joe Liggins “The Honeydripper”

12. Wynonie Harris “Good Rockin’ Tonight”

13. Roy Brown “Boogie at Midnight”

14. Cecil Gant “We’re Gonna Rock”

15. Big Maybelle “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On”

16. Little Junior Parker “Next Time You See Me”

17. Big Mama Thornton “Hound Dog”

18. Little Richard “Send Me Some Lovin’”

19. Esquerita “Why Did It Take You So Long?”

20. Johnny Ace “Never Let Me Go”

21. James Brown & the Famous Flames “Please, Please, Please” & "Night Train"

Now in London: Rock Family Trees at the Barbican

Here's something else I've been meaning to post about for ages, but haven't. Well, today is the day! The Barbican's library is currently hosting a free exhibit honoring one of my favorite rock & roll-related bits of academia, the Pete Frame Rock Family Trees. Pete Frame should be in the Rock Hall for his work...seriously! Running through Sept. 28, get more details here.

NYC Clubbing Nostalgia: Danceteria and After Hours

Over the last couple of days, two articles of note have come to my attention regarding "the old days" here in NYC. They may be of interest to some of you, and will do nicely as we await the follow up to Love Saves The Day, by Tim Lawrence, which will cover the NYC club scene in the 80's.

The guys over at the always interesting DJ History just posted a story that's as much a tribute to the late, great Mark Kamins as much as it is about Danceteria. 

"In New York in the eighties, more was more. The city was crawling out from its burnt-out seventies bankruptcy and wanted to pile on as much colour and life and asymmetric haircuts as it could cram into a strobe-lit graffiti-strewn cellar. Rents were still dirt cheap in many parts, especially the areas below 14th Street, so if you had the driving ambition to open a gallery or a nightclub, or a boutique, or a performance space, it wasn’t hard to find a basement or a derelict storefront and get on with it." Continued here.

And, originally posted in 2009, Steve Lewis writes a brief history of after hours clubs in New York during the 80's for Black Book magazine. Robots images courtesy of Save The Robots' Facebook group.

 
"In the 1980s, the illegality, desperation and danger of the after-hours scene were drugs in themselves. I ran a joint called The World for some guys who were so unsavory that their lawyer partner seemed honest by comparison. After the filler patrons had all gone to bed, the owners would open the door for special friends and celebrities, who partied until dawn and beyond. In one of the boldest outlaw moves ever, a sledgehammer opened up a common wall to the burnt-out tenement next door. Squatters were rousted, and the space became the new It Club. Five-gallon jugs of vodka were hidden in the ceiling and connected to pipes and faucets, and the brew was served to Madonna, Carolina Herrera and Joan Rivers -- to Prince as well as paupers." Continued here.

Happening Now Thru August 10: THE AFRIKA BAMBAATAA MASTER OF RECORDS OPEN ARCHIVE at Gavin brown's enterprise

Gavin Brown’s enterprise and Johan Kugelberg/Boo-Hooray Gallery, together with Afrika Bambaataa, the Universal Zulu Nation, and Cornell University Library announce the public archiving of one of the most important record collections in the history of hip hop:

The Afrika Bambaataa Master of Records vinyl archive
From July 11 through August 10, Kugelberg and his team will be organizing, cataloguing, and documenting Afrika Bambaataa’s peerless vinyl collection at Gavin Brown’s enterprise, Monday through Friday between 12 – 5 PM. Visitors are encouraged to stop by, hear some great music and see how the cultural artifacts of this important strand of American history are preserved.

Open archiving, like an archeological dig or a group of students viewing biological research in a museum, is an important and rarely seen part of the process of documenting history. Before the Afrika Bambaataa archive moves to its permanent home at Cornell University’s Hip Hop Collection in the Fall of 2013, Johan Kugelberg and Gavin Brown’s enterprise offer visitors a unique opportunity to experience what is arguably the most important gathering of vinyl in the history of hip hop while it is sorted, organized, archived (and DJ'd) in full view of the public.

Gavin Brown's enterprise is located at 620 Greenwich Street, NYC, and can be reached at 212-627-5258 or via email here.

Universal Zulu Nation
Cornell Hip Hop Archive
Bambaataa Visiting Scholar 

Kickstarter Project of Note: Graffiti Rock 30th Anniversary

Holman by Arne Svensen

Michael Holman - he of the band Gray, associate of Jean Michel Basquiat, and general scenemaker on the downtown scene of early 80's NYC - has something else he'd like you to know about, and its worth a look. He was one of the earlier promoters of hip hop & graffiti culture in New York. Not only did he do a lot to bring hip hop downtown (literally), he also conceived of and hosted a short lived, but nevertheless influential TV show, Graffiti Rock. Not unlike American Bandstand or Soul Train in format, its difficult to imagine now that Graffiti Rock was absolutely groundbreaking at the time as hip hop was incredibly new as a genre. And besides the almost novelty hit status of "Rapper's Delight" in 1979, the genre was a long way from being socially acceptable. 

It turns out that 2014 will be the 30th anniversary of the show, and to celebrate, Holman is working on a retrospective collection of the show and related materials to release. He's also working on a documentary about the show, and hip hop culture at the time which will be packaged together with the Graffiti Rock collection. Watch the video below, and if you're so inclined, donate to his Kickstarter.

Added bonus - watch the episode of Graffiti Rock below the Kickstarter video.

The New York City Breakers on the set of Graffiti Rock. Shot by Martha Cooper.